Friday, February 10, 2017

Catching Up - Mythics and Nighthold

I was running a Mythic Plus the other night with my old crew (Wichita, Black, Lakini and Donk) and one of them mentioned how he missed reading the old blogs I did. Most of my writing free time has been devoted either to my Blizzard Watch columns or to the novel I'm working on. Something had to give, and for a long time, that's been this blog. Lately, though, I've found that I, too, have missed the outlet.

I'm going back to my original vision for this space of chronically my adventures through Azeroth. At most, I'll post weekly. These articles won't be as polished as my Blizzard Watch stuff. The editors over there are first class and help me take my writing to whole other level. What you'll see here is raw Honors Hammer.

Mythic Plus Shenanigans

That Mythic Plus I did was amazing. These guys have many different toons, but I think the composition was Paladin Tank (yours truly), Hunter, Balance Druid, Rogue, and Demon Hunter. It was a Darkheart Thicket+2, but the interesting part to me was that we ran it with one tank and four DPS. No healer. Well, technically, I guess you could say I was the healer as well as the tank. Basically, my crew could kill stuff so fast that my self healing through Judgment of Light, and Hand of the Protector plus my cooldowns could sustain me. With my Relics, I've gotten Ardent Defender down to almost a 1 minute cooldown. It wasn't until we tried Maw of Souls+6 with Raging that Lakini switched over to Resto. Maw is the Mythic I know the least, but even with it being maybe my 3rd time in there, we still beat the timer. The only real problem I had was the Seacursed Swiftblades. These guys turn into ghosts, teleport and then whack you pretty good. With the Raging buff, those guys could about one shot me.

Raiding

On the raiding front, I'm firmly cemented as a main tank in Voracity. We're a normal mode, 3 hour a week guild working our way through Nighthold. We've got Skorpyron, Chronomatic Anomaly, and Trilliax pretty well on farm at this point. I take the little scorpions on Skorpyron. With Avenger's Shield, Consecration, Eye of Tyr, and Blessed Hammer picking them up is not a problem. I drag them to the boss where our melee DPS cleaves them into bits. Chronomatic Anomaly is an interesting fight. Our healers are amazing and we've never had much trouble with it. I adore the voice acting on Trilliax and its a fun fight overall. There isn't anything 'Paladin' specific I do on either of those two fights.

Sorry for the Wall-O-Text. Here's a picture of my current Trasnmog:

Spellblade Aluriel

Our roadblock has been Spellblade Aluriel. We do fine on the Frost and Fire stages, but Arcane is usually a mess. I have to stay with my coTank as we move out of Arcane Fog while mitigating Annihilate. Sometimes we have to do that with a bunch of Arcane adds in the way. If we get separated, one or both of us is going down. For Annihilate, I try to make sure I have multiple charges of Shield of the Righteous ready. When I have two stacks of the debuff, I'll add in a cooldown. This is one fight where I like having Aegis of Light talented as it can help both me and my coTank, but I usually only get one use of it per fight. We actually managed to get her down (our fist kill), but it required a battle rez used on each tank. I'm not sure how repeatable it is at this point.

Krosus

We had enough time left over to go take some stabs at Krosus. I still owe this guy big time after what he did to Tirion. Do you I've forgotten, Krosus? Do you think I've forgiven?

We made some decent progress, but didn't get it down. It's something of a relief to have a fight that is mechanically simpler after the more complicated Spellblade fight. It looks like we are going to be cutting it real close on the DPS check for this fight. All I can do is try to stay alive, but if the other tank goes down the debuff is going to do me in in short order.